Former Alibaba Group general manager detained on bribery suspicions

Hanzhou police investigate manager removed from his post in March because of alleged misconduct

By Michael Kan

July 6, 2012

IDG News Service

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has revealed a former general manager in charge of its group-buying website had been detained by local police on suspicions of accepting bribes.

Police in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, where Alibaba Group is headquartered, are currently investigating Yan Limin, the company said in a posting.

Yan had been removed from his position at the group buying site called Juhuasuan last March, allegedly because of "professional misconduct". According to Alibaba, he was transferred to another department.

Alibaba said in a statement it would not tolerate any misconduct within the company, and wanted to be transparent with customers and vendors whenever incidents of this nature were found.

"We noted a handful of isolated situations over the past 18 months, that once detected were acted upon swiftly, and in many cases resulted in consultation with the authorities for follow up," the company added.

Alibaba Group operates Taobao Mall and Taobao Marketplace, two of China's largest e-commerce sites. The company has had cases of alleged corruption by employees in the past. The biggest, fraudulent transactions involving 2,326 suppliers in the company's Alibaba.com business that occurred last year, identified through an investigation.

Both the CEO and COO of Alibaba.com resigned as a result. 100 sales people, along with supervisors and sales managers, had allowed the fraud to initially evade the company's detection.